The ArchestrAnaut

So I know we took a poll and came up with a few top vote getters on what tools to work on first. 

Due to a few different issues external to the voting itself we’re going to go with aaCleanup/aaRemoteCleanup first.  A friend from Everdyn has agreed to take the lead on the project and as of right now we have everyone we need for the development effort.  This is expected to be a really tiny little project so it won’t take many.  Some of these others will definitely require more people. 

Our hope is that this will take a handful of weeks to get ready for prime time.  When it’s ready “all of my little archestranauts” (in my best Chef voice) will be the first to know.

Here’s hoping this is the first of many successful projects!

- Andy

This is my attempt to make a post to host a poll for the aaOpenSource projects.

Please Vote in the Poll Below.  As we get new ideas I’ll update the poll answers.

Note that you may vote for more than one project at a time!

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If you’ve followed the comments posted on my previous entry you can see that there seems to be a lot of interest by some really heavy hitters on this topic.  In the interest of getting things going I will post a few of my ideas as well as some from the comments.  I’ll try to figure out how to create a poll that we can use where people can vote on which ones we should tackle first.  I think I may split this into two groups; tools and objects.  I think there is room for one group of people to work on engineering tools while another group works on objects with advanced functionality.

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Does this sound familiar?  You’re working on an issue or a project and you have a brilliant idea for a tool to either save you lots of time or make a system run better.  So you start working on it for a few nights, make some good progress, then you get busy, lose focus……you know the end of the story.  But wow that really was a great idea and you really wish you could finish it. 

At this point I’ve given up on even starting these projects because I know I’ll never finish them.  Well, my efforts are pretty much wasted if I have started something then dropped it before it’s done and usable. 

So here is my idea.  I know we have some really brilliant people in the Archestranaut community.  Also, because we’re all so good at what we do and very much in demand we don’t have enough time as individuals… but what if we pooled our efforts on a single project to come up with something great… nothing new here it’s called Open Sourcing.  And that’s what I want to do with all of these cool projects we’ve all been working on .

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Rob Kambach posted a question in a Linked In group about dumping support for Vista.  Other than the fact that I have never seen Vista on a plant floor one should also consider the support cycle for this OS and others.  Here’s a great summary page from Microsoft.

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I had a recent issue with my alarms not showing up in my alarm banner in InTouch (Windows 7 & IAS 2012).  What was weird was that I could trigger an alarm and it would log to the alarm database, but I couldn’t see in the live alarms banner.  Closing and restarting the InTouch app had zero effect, but rebooting the PC seemed to fix it on the first or second reboot.  The only messages in the SMC related to “Attempting to Connect to Provider ‘\\$localhost:\galaxy’” (see below).

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Found another really awesome post from our French friends.

http://www.everdyn.com/use-scripts-as-functions-in-archestra-graphics/

All of us would love to say that we come up with brilliant ideas out of thin air.  Unfortunately that’s usually not the case.   It was a very observant person that came up with the saying “Necessity is the mother of invention”.  Just as the circumstances that led us to create the Hyper Scale Dynamic IO construct so is the same with these folks in the creation of their Dynamic HMI.  All I can say is WOW!  Keep up the great work and more importantly thanks for sharing.

- Andy

Just came across these folks while following a thread on a linked in group.  They look like they have some really neat tools you should probably be checking out.

http://www.everdyn.com/blog/

- The Archestranaut

I have been buried in a System Platform project for several months now & finally have a moment to surface.  I ran into a few things that caused me a few headaches and am documenting them here to hopefully save everyone some time.

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We are engaged with a customer where we are delivering System Platform on standalone skids.  It’s a pretty new experience for us.  We’re used to stacking up a bunch of Dual Xeon servers with tons of RAM with thousands and thousands of IO.  This one was quite different.  We are running everything on a single, fanless PC mounted in a stainless steel enclosure with a few hundred IO.

Early on in the process we were given a pretty tight power requirement so we ended up with a Intel Atom D525 processor in our unit.  It booted quickly.  We didn’t have any obvious issues during development.  Programs opened and closed quickly, everything seemed ok.  To be fair we did most of our development on our VSphere infrastructure so we only had a small amount of time before FAT for full blown testing.

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